Never mind Baz's stat about one win in 16 after international breaks... whats the stat for when cheap tickets have been on offer...
I wouldn't blame concentration but it wasn't purely the freak deflection. The deflection was able to hurt us because we allowed them to have the ball on our penalty spot requiring a last ditch intervention within 10 seconds of the kickoff. That happened primarily because Hughes was easily and comprehensively beaten in the air from the long ball. Someone said it was a 50/50 but how often do teams let us win headers in or on the edge of their box? We can't let that happen and then blame our luck when it ends up in our net via a deflection.
Why do people say the priority in summer is to sign a striker? To have even half a chance, you need 2, even 3 good strikers, and that's without even considering the seemingly inevitable **** luck we have with injuries! TC, yep, the stats for that must be awful. On that at least, you have to feel for the owner. Time and again these gestures are made, but the team manage to screw it up.
You're ignoring the critical fact that our record since Selles was appointed is a mid table record. So objectively, we're not at the bottom because of anything he or the players have done since December. It's because we gave the rest of the league such a head start before then.
Some clubs don't operate on common sense, they operate on "that guy is only 20 and is playing in the Championship, buy him at all costs."
Saying a goal is our defence’s fault because they allowed the ball to enter our penalty box is, I suppose, technically right but doesn’t really advance the argument. It happens tens of times every game. Our player cleared the ball and it took a one in a thousand deflection off a teammate. That is vanishingly unlikely to happen.
Because in the last few seasons in the Championship, our striker's totals read as follows: Pedro - 6 Bedia - 2 Burstow - 2 Delap - 8 Connolly - 8 Carvalho - 9 Ohio - 3 Oscar - 13 Smith - 3 Allahyar - 2 Eaves - 5 Magennis - 2 Wilks - 3 That's an appalling record for strikers at this level. Last season Morgan Whittaker managed 19 for Plymouth, who finished 21st. If we have any ambition of at least staying in the division, then this idea of needing a striker needs to stop being played down. We've consistently relied on wingers and AMs scoring the bulk of our goals for nearly four seasons, there has to come a point where this is addressed if we want to actually make progress.
I think you've missed the point Mr Toast! Yes, of course we need a striker who scores goals. But the point I was making was that people keep talking in the singular. Whilst even one would at least be a start (until they inevitably get crocked), we need more than one! We should be looking at 2, maybe even 3, proper goal scoring strikers coming in during summer. p.s. it goes further than that too. I posted a few months back the goal scoring record of all our senior players. It was gob-smackingly poor. Not only do we need strikerS who score, we also need players across the park who contribute; defenders, midfielders and wingers. We simply don't have goals within our squad, and I can't get my head round how this has been so badly overlooked.
Ah I see. Well assuming we get a quality striker in, then I'd give Pedro another year and buy Gelhardt (and play him down the middle instead of out wide). See if Fener want to offload any of their players, there's a few we'd want in our side.
That's a relief then. It's good to know that the season only started in December and therefore we can't be relegated. This is exactly the point I'm making! Whilst you're pointing out that we're too good to be relegated, we're slipping towards the bottom three.
Surely you can see that it happened at the end of a bad situation though? Coyle was making a last ditch attempt to prevent a clear shot at goal from the middle of the area, we were already totally stretched. Calling it "the ball entering our penalty box" is seriously downplaying it. We were all over the place, and that made the deflected goal possible. It didn't just happen out of the blue.
We're not slipping towards it. We've been getting steadily further from it since Selles took over. Obviously it can't be 100% linear, we make steps forward and back, but the overall trend is very clear. I didn't say we're too good to be relegated or that the record prior to December doesn't count. Clearly it does count and that is still our problem currently. I was saying that our record since December isn't the problem, and that disproves several of the things that you listed as reasons that we're near the bottom.
Apparently Luton have 2 strikers that scored more than 10 goals each last season in the Premier league. Neither have got to double figures this season in the championship. It's not easy to go buy a goal scorer.
We need to give Joseph time. My Preston supporting mate could not believe me that Liam Delap was a top championship striker talking to him last year. He told me he couldn’t score in a brothel when at Deepdale. Clearly time and the right coaching can make a massive difference. Joseph has the right attitude and is young, he could be one of the 3 decent strikers we need next season (hopefully in the championship).
Yep. Part of our problem recruitment wise is that we never seem to give players time. We sign them on these big deals and then spend most of their contract trying to get rid of them and farming them out on stopgap loans whilst still paying them. I posted in January when he signed that we have to stick by him now, and we can't be binning him off because he doesn't score a load straight away. This path was very predictable. We can't be spending millions on a player and not having conviction about it. I've referenced it a lot but Brentford are the gold standard for this. Look at KLP's time there. If that was us we'd have binned him off after season one when he couldn't stay fit or make an impact when he was fit. But now he's a regular for them and they love him.
